and when your biggest trading partner has a no-growth philosophy and paralyzing itsowneconomy, youare not doing a lot of business with a partner, and the proximate cause for the weakness here in the united states was the shellacking in gold and the worst decline since 1980, and what we look at the etf falling 8% in a single day and now gold futures tumbling 15% in two days, and that is remarkable. and what caused that go down hideously? and gold and wheat causing all of the commodities to plummet, and oil did drop a little bit more than $2 after being down badly last week, i could say, yes, to that. i could say, yes, gold is that powerful and crush all sorts of assets in the declining wake, but it isn't. i could easily tell you, of course, that the slowing in china caused gold, copper, aluminum and other stocks the decline. it didn't. it would be an excuse that would fit the picture, but mystify you even more and really be nothing more than attempt by me to put the irrational in the rational box and then wrap a bow on it. think about it. china is terrible all year and nothing new

's almost always because of fears about a steep slow down intheeconomy. now,it'stheglobaleconomy. yeah,the worries used to be the united states centric. and perhaps the economy had been growing too hot. and the fed was raising rates. perhaps the monthly employment numbers showed a sudden reduction as we saw in the late summer of 2007, which ushered in the great recession. maybe there is a shocking shutdown in retail sales. now, i'm not saying that every single selloff plays out like this, but the vast majority of them actually really do. of course, lately we have a new element. we are all one world these days and a slow down in china is now greeted as more of a threat to our stock market than an actually slow down here in the united states. crazy. but it's true. when you get these kind of jitters, which include the requisite collapse in commodities like oil and copper and the markets sell, sell, sell, can't be combatted overnight because it's so horrendous, it does kind of paralyze things. but here's what happens. certain sectors stabilize a lot faster than others. particularly if the

ofthiseconomythatare going strong? like housing. a totally domestic industry. not france, not generation not socgen. that's not going to be droild by european woes or a chinese slowdown. they have nothing to do with each other. the housing comeback is still with us. as we know from yesterday's terrific housing starts number. and this is the kind of huge multiyear theme that's going to keep powering forward no matter what you're fretting about. take a look at this chart of new housing starts. you can see that we're very much on the upswing. but we still have a long way to go before we reach the elevated levels that we saw back in 2005-2006. so how do we play the housing resurgence? right now what do we do? what can we snoen what about realogy? a huge realtor that's the world's largest fran schooizer of residential real estate brokerages. coldwell banker, century 21, sotheby's, better homes and garde gardens. last year this company was involved in more thain quarter of all domestic home sales transactions that involved the broker. they are that big. they came public back on october 27th. i